यक्ष पिंपळ आणि यक्षी कडुलिंब ... The Pipal and the Neem: The Greek Experience of India

Richard Stoneman writes in his wonderful  'The Greek Experience of India: from Alexander to the Indo-Greeks':

"... It may be possible to add to the list of trees observed by the Greeks the two that occur in the Latin Letter of Alexander to Aristotle about India. After his conquest of India,

Some of the wise men of the kingdom came to Alexander and said, ‘Your majesty, we have something to show you which deserves your special attention. We will take you to the trees that speak with a human voice’. So they brought Alexander to a place where there was a sanctuary of the Sun and the Moon. There was a guardpost here, and two trees closely resembling cypresses. Around these stood trees that resembled what in Egypt is called the myrrh-nut [this is the myrobalan tree, or amala, ambla, amlaki in Hindi], and their fruits were also similar. The two trees in the middle of the garden spoke, the one with a man’s voice, the other with a woman’s. The name of the male one was Sun, and of the female one Moon, or in their own language, Moutheamatous....

...Of the many sacred trees in India, two stand out for importance, the pipal and the neem. The pipal is perhaps the holiest tree in India, further sanctified by its association with the Buddha, who achieved enlightenment sitting under one at Bodhgaya, known as the bodhi tree. It is regarded as a masculine tree. The neem is widely regarded as a beneficent and friendly tree, and is usually thought of as a feminine. Many trees in fact have a feminine aspect, being the home of a yakṣī or (feminine) tree spirit. (Yakṣas, masculine, are equally common.)

Haberman reports a conversation with two Hindu workers who were in charge of sweeping the temple at Bodhgaya:

For us there are two sacred trees. One is a god [devata]; the other is a goddess [devi]. The first is the pipal; the second is the neem. The pipal is Vasudeva; the neem tree is Shervahani.

 

A pipal and a neem tree entwined (‘married’), near the Rock inscription of Aśoka at East of Kailash, Delhi

Sometimes the trees even intertwine, or are said to be ‘married’, and in the eleventh-century Persian poem Shahnameh the trees visited by Alexander are said to twine together into a single tree, one trunk being male and the other female.

…The Alexander Romance makes explicit not only that the trees are male and female but that they are trees of the Sun and Moon respectively. The pipal is sometimes said to be ‘the abode of the Sun on earth’ and is associated with the sacred fire: in kindling the sacrificial fire ‘the friction drill was made from pipal wood and was considered male, whereas the friction pan was made from sami wood and considered female’. The pipal tree is also often said to be the home of the god Shani, son of the Sun and brother of Death, though sometimes he only takes up his abode there on Saturdays, as otherwise the tree is Vasudev’s....

Battle of Austerlitz@220...Pinnacle of Napoleon's Success and Seeds of His Ultimate Destruction

The Battle of Austerlitz (2 December 1805), also known as the Battle of the Three Emperors, was one of the most important military engagements of the Napoleonic Wars. The battle occurred near the town of Austerlitz in the Austrian Empire (now Slavkov u Brna in the Czech Republic). Around 158,000 troops were involved, of which around 24,000 were killed or wounded. The battle is often cited by military historians as one of Napoleon's tactical masterpieces….

Napoleon:

“There is a movement in engagements when the least manoeuvre is decisive and gives a victory; it is the one drop of water which makes the vessel run over.…”

Count Yorck von Wartenburg :

“Napoleon did not, after all, vanquish his enemies so much by the battles of Ulm and Jena, however disastrous these were, as by his incredible marches.”

Honoré de Balzac,  Louis Lambert, 1832:

“When I read the story of the Battle of Austerlitz I saw every incident. The roar of the cannon, the cries of the fighting men rang in my ears and made my inmost self quiver.”

 Alistair Horne, "How Far From Austerlitz?: Napoleon 1805-1815", 1996 :

"...If Austerlitz raised Napoleon to the pinnacle of his success, it also turned his head and filled it with the delusion that no force or combination of forces could now stop him conquering the world. On the Pratzen Heights were born the seeds of his ultimate destruction.

Summing up on the ‘dazzling glory’ of Austerlitz, (Adolphe) Thiers was to write a generation later:

A campaign of three months, instead of a war of several years, as it had first been feared, the Continent disarmed, the French Empire extended to limits which it ought never to have passed, a dazzling glory added to our arms, public and private credit miraculously restored, new prospects of peace and prosperity opened to the nation.… For calm and reflective minds, if any such were left in presence of these events, there was but one subject for fear – the inconstancy of Fortune, and what is still more to be dreaded, the weakness of the human mind, which sometimes bears adversity without quailing and rarely prosperity without committing great faults...."

 

 Claudia Cardinale in "Austerlitz", 1960